Principal Data Scientist - Generative AI

Package Description

Job Reference:21112

Band:D

Salary: up to £87,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

Contract type:Permanent

Location:Office base can be either London (W1A), Salford, Glasgow or Newcastle. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.

Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.

Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.

You can find out more about working at the BBC by selecting this link to our .

If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process, please contact the . For any general queries, please contact: .

Job Introduction

The BBC has been serving audiences online for more than 20 years. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, News, Sport, Weather and Sounds, we entertain, educate and inform audiences in their millions every day.

But behind the scenes we have work to do. We are making the shift from being a broadcaster that speaks to our audiences to becoming a service that is directly shaped by them and designed around their wants and needs. We are creating personalised content, products and services that bring the right content to the right people, at the right time: a personalised BBC. This will be our greatest leap since iPlayer, and that’s why it’s right at the top of our agenda.

At the BBC we see AI and data science as fundamental on that journey. We use these technologies to enrich our content, improve journalist workflows and power personalised experiences for millions of audience members.

To help drive this effort, we’re looking for a Principal Data Scientist to join the Content Publishing Data Science team in Product Group. The successful candidate will be a technical leader in a highly cross-functional team of data scientists, engineers, product managers and UX designers, working to build AI products from research to impactful production systems. The team has a focus on large language models and other generative AI technologies, which the BBC is using to support content production and audience engagement.

We are a friendly and supportive team, and we love that we get to work on interesting and important problems that have a real impact on the audience's experience and the future of the BBC.

Interview Process

2 Interviews:
• 30-minute hiring manager interview covering your motivations for applying, expectations about the role and your background and skills. This interview is also for you to ask questions about the role to see if it is a good fit.
• 1.5-hour technical presentation and behavioural interview covering relevant competencies for the role.

Main Responsibilties

As a Principal Data Scientist, you will deliver value to BBC audiences by developing machine learning products at scale. We are looking for individuals who combine a breadth of knowledge with deep specialism in one or two areas. You will do hands-on coding work to develop, deploy and iterate on generative AI systems, lead architecture design, implement ideas from recent research papers, do code reviews and set best practice.

The successful candidate will also have strong interpersonal skills to lead projects involving several different teams, such as the data science & engineering, AI research, ML platform and user-facing application teams, and to effectively engage with editorial stakeholders.

Principal Data Scientists at the BBC are expected to have an impact both within their immediate team and across the wider BBC AI community: setting technical best practice, sharing knowledge, mentoring junior colleagues and shaping culture and ways of working.

Are you the right candidate

Essential criteria:
• Extensive hands-on experience in data science and machine learning.
• Strong coding skills, particularly in Python.
• Expertise in large language models/generative AI.
• Proven track record leading projects to deliver value in production.
• Ability to clearly communicate to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team.

Desirable experience:
• Good knowledge of cloud services, ideally AWS.
• Experience with model lifecycle management and MLOps, including model deployment, versioning and monitoring.
• Good knowledge of code management and deployment best practices.
• Ability to mentor and support other team members.

You are encouraged to apply even if you don’t meet every one of the criteria above!

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours .

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.